


Why Should a Star, a Star Ever Be Afraid of the Dark

by lurkinglurkerwholurks



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Death, Emotional Hurt, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Happy Hogan (mentioned) - Freeform, Loss of Parent(s), May Parker (mentioned) - Freeform, Morgan Stark is a baller, Ned Leeds (mentioned) - Freeform, Pepper Potts (mentioned) - Freeform, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Peter Parker is a Good Bro, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Post-Endgame, Snap-related trauma, Tony Stark (mentioned) - Freeform, no editing we typo like mne
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-17
Updated: 2019-05-17
Packaged: 2020-03-06 15:53:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18854245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurkinglurkerwholurks/pseuds/lurkinglurkerwholurks
Summary: Morgan lifted an eyebrow. It was a surprisingly piercing look for a five-year-old, and not just because it made her look like her dad.Morgan and Peter have a talk that needed to happen. There's crying involved, and also crayons.





	Why Should a Star, a Star Ever Be Afraid of the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know why I'm back heeeeeeere, I'm a BatFam writer. Alas, ze angst, it calls to me.
> 
> Obviously, Endgame spoilers. Morgan's _existence_ is a spoiler. So. You've been warned.

Peter bit his bottom lip as he traced the metal leg of the Imperial Walker, extending the line of grey from the box shape of the body down to where the snow would be. Maybe he shouldn’t have picked the Battle of Hoth as his muse. A snow battle on white paper was boring. He paused, frowned, and set the paper aside.

“Are you done?”

Peter lifted his head and shook it with a smile. Dark eyes watched him from the computer screen.

“Changed my mind on what I wanted to do. How about you? How’s yours coming?”

Morgan lifted her paper to show him a half-finished drawing. At least, he was pretty sure it was half-finished. There was a person, but they didn’t have any legs, just long arms like an orangoutang, a blobby sort of head, and long brown stuff he thought might be hair. 

“Uh-huh. And who’s that?”

Morgan, from her room in the Adirondacks cabin, lifted an eyebrow. It was a surprisingly piercing look for a five-year-old, and not just because it made her look like her dad.

“Me!” she said, as if it should be obvious. And maybe it was, if Peter squinted and thought about it. Not like he’d been around little kids a lot. He liked them, sure, but he didn’t have _experience_ with them like Ned did.

“Oh, of course,” he agreed quickly, and that seemed to placate her. They were still in a weird place, the two of them, and not just because Peter was over a decade older and lived in a two-bedroom, fourth-floor walkup in Queens while she had spent her whole life in the most technologically advanced cabin ever.

Peter was still getting used to Morgan, to everything like her that proved that life had gone on while he had been… away. One minute, he’d been a regular kid punching aliens in space, and the next, it was five years later. Five whole years. And there were people like Morgan who hadn’t existed when he’d closed his eyes but were suddenly here, sparkly princess tiara on her head and a tiny _Ready to Rock_ t-shirt stained with what looked like a smear of goldfish crackers.

Five years and suddenly Mr. Stark was…

Peter brushed the thought away like a cobweb and tapped the screen, pointing to the colorful mess at the crayon Morgan’s not-feet. “And what’s all that?”

“Everybody.” The paper sagged a little in Morgan’s grip, tilting the corner out of view, but Peter could still make out what were probably heads and waving arms amid the chaos.

Peter liked Morgan. She was a smart kid with a mile-a-minute mouth and great taste in Disney movies. When her mom—Pepper, she’d insisted Peter call her—had first suggested the video calls, Peter hadn’t been so sure. Who was he, anyways? Just a stranger, some kid from Queens who’d come barreling back with half the planet. Morgan had Pepper and Happy and Colonel Rhodes and all of those guys. What did she need him for?

He wondered if it had something to do with the lake. Peter had sat at the end of the pier by himself after the service, feet dangling over the water, staring at nothing, when a black-dressed little girl had appeared just behind him.

“You’re supposed to take your shoes off,” she had told him.

Peter had turned slightly, scrubbing at his eyes as he did, and mumbled something intelligent like “Huh?”

The girl had plunked down next to him in a huff, as if his ignorance offended her, and proceeded to peel off her lace-cuffed socks and buckled black shoes.

“See?” she had said, swinging her bare toes over the surface of the lake. “It’s better with your shoes off.”

Peter had taken off his shoes, and they had sat there together, watching the air slowly thicken with gnats and then mosquitoes as the sun dipped lower and lower and turned the lake golden. She had been right about the shoes.

“I’m Peter,” Peter had said finally, as if tapped by the finger of Aunt May.

“I know,” the girl had said. “Your picture’s in my house.” She had pointed back toward the cabin, where Pepper’s silhouette stood on the porch, watching. “I’m Morgan.”

Pepper had kept in touch, after. Peter wasn’t really sure why. If she had disappeared entirely, after, he wouldn’t have blamed her. Even if she hadn’t, why she’d want to keep in touch with _him_ , he couldn’t say. But she did. She would call sometimes, just to check in on him, like he’d been the one to… to lose… Like May wasn’t just in the other room, like he wouldn’t see Ned and MJ on Monday or Mr. Delmar and Murph on his way to school. He didn’t understand why she called, but he appreciated it regardless.

And a lot of the time when Pepper called, as she got near the end, she’d call to Morgan and ask if she wanted to talk to Peter. And Morgan always said yes. They weren’t long talks at first (he couldn’t handle long calls, not when half his friends were college graduates now and Murph had grey fur around his nose and Morgan would groan out an exasperated “come on” that sounded it had been channeled straight from a dead man’s mouth), but Peter enjoyed them, even if they left him staring at a wall after.

Somehow, quick hellos at the end of a phone call became video calls. They weren’t as often as the hellos, but they were nice. It was easier to understand kids, Peter found, when he could see them and read their face and their body as well as their voice. Or maybe that was just Morgan, who talked with her hands as much as with her mouth.

Sometimes Morgan would take the phone and run him through the house, showing Peter her room with her bed and the toybox and the living room with the holographic controls and the kitchen with the countertop that popped out fresh fruit, like she hadn’t shown him all of the same things the week before.

Sometimes they would do homework together, Morgan scrunching up her nose as she tried to pick apart her d’s from her b’s and her p’s from her q’s, while Peter tried to make himself care about the Visigoths crossing the Danube in 238.

And sometimes they would do things like today, each building LEGO crafts to show each other or crayon drawings of whatever they felt like creating.

“Everybody, huh? What’re they doing?” Peter asked, still trying to make sense of Morgan’s current masterpiece.

“Cheering,” Morgan said matter-of-factly. “That’s Mommy and Happy and Uncle Rhodey and you and Amanda and Maddox and Mr. Lu and Mrs. Iye and—“

Morgan rattled off more names Peter didn’t know or only knew in passing—classmates and teachers, mail carriers and grocery baggers. She was good like that, like both of her parents, noticing people, even if she only met them once. 

Morgan pointed to the legless giant spread over the rest of the page. “I saved them, because I’m big and strong.”

Crayon Morgan _was_ big, towering over the the huddled masses with her monkey arms raised in triumph.

“Good job,” Peter praised. “What are you saving them from?” He didn’t see any bad guys, but maybe that one orange squiggle…

Morgan shrugged, little shoulders rising high around her ears before plunking down again. She lowered the paper out of frame and reached for another crayon. “Being sad.”

Peter picked up a green crayon, freezing only for a moment at the answer. This seemed like the sort of thing the spidey sense really should warn him about. Flying cars, sure, those too, but what were those compared to emotionally fraught conversations with kindergarteners?

“Oh?” he managed.

“Yeah.” Morgan herself didn’t sound too sad, which was good, but there was a deep crease between her eyebrows, like she was thinking hard. “Mrs. Iye was sad today.”

“Yeah?”

Should he ask? He didn’t want to ask. There were too many reasons to be sad. It seemed unfair. Like, they were back, right? After five years of being dead, after being lost, they were all back. The world should be ecstatic. And the world was, but…

“Yeah. She was all weird in class. Kiki had to say her name three times to get a bathroom pass. And she had a sad face. I heard her talking with Ms. Davis after class.” Morgan’s eyes were on her paper, her messy dark hair falling around her face. “I saw a spider under the water fountain and wanted to say hi. They didn’t see me, but I could hear them.”

Peter swallowed. “O-Oh?”

“Mrs. Iye got married. The whole class got to go to the wedding. There was cake and we got to blow bubbles. It was fun, and Mr. Iye was really nice.” Morgan’s hand moved faster as she scribbled. “She used to be Mrs. Edo, before that. Mr. Edo got dusted, like you.”

Hearing it always made Peter’s body thrum, like a giant hand plucking on his wiring. Like he was somehow connected to those millions and billions of other people who disintegrated into nothing. Like he might vibrate and go to pieces all over again. He shivered and scrubbed the heel of his hand against his leg, out of sight where Morgan couldn’t see.

_Here. Still here_.

“Mr. Edo came back. And she’s sad, because he’s still Mr. Edo, but she’s not Mrs. Edo anymore.”

“Oh,” Peter breathed. “Yeah, that… that sucks.”

The Edos—the Iyes—they weren’t unique. For every happy story about a family reunited, there was another about people returning only to find out that their loved ones had moved on or died. Weddings were still a thing after the Snap. So were babies. And car accidents and relocations and cancer and birthdays. Life went on. Death went on, too.

When Peter had first learned about the Snap, about the missing five years, he remembered thinking _I hope Aunt May is okay. I hope she wasn’t dusted like me_. But the more he heard the stories, the more he saw the chaos of four billion people suddenly popping back into existence, the more he was glad she was.

Morgan looked up, dark eyes lash-rimmed and solemn. Too young and too old all at once. “Peter?”

“Yeah, bite-sized?”

“Is my daddy coming back?”

The crayon snapped in Peter’s hand, a tiny _crack_ of Fern. He didn’t want to upset her, and he wasn’t sure what would be worse—staring down at his paper with the blood rushing in his ears and the knuckles on his fingers drained white, or looking up with tears in his eyes.

He couldn’t not look at her. He couldn’t not tell her the truth, no matter how badly he wanted to lie.

“No,” Peter whispered, “no, I don’t think so.”

“But why?” Morgan didn’t look upset. There were no tears in _her_ eyes. But the crease was still there, the little Stark furrow that meant a problem in need of solving. “Mr. Edo came back. _You_ came back.”

Peter looked away, blowing out a breath as he did. He’d come back, alright. They’d all come back, pulled out of nothingness by a bananas plan that he still couldn’t wrap his head around, no matter how many times it was explained it to him. He’d come back and he’d fought with everything he had, and it hadn’t been enough. To save the world, to save _him_ , Mr. Stark had taken the stones and Snapped. And died.

_We won. We won, Mr. Stark. We won, you did it, sir._

They’d won. And they’d lost.

“Peter?”

Peter sniffled and cleared his throat. “It, uh, it doesn’t work like that, M. I wish it did.”

“But why doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know.”

He came back. So did Aunt May and Ned and MJ and billions of other people. But not his parents. Not Uncle Ben. Not Black Widow. And not Mr. Stark.

Peter knew it was because of Mr. Stark’s instructions. _Bring them back, but change nothing else_. Mr. Stark had wanted to save people, but not at the cost of losing Morgan. But losing himself was deemed okay.

_Why?_

Peter forced himself to meet Morgan’s gaze. His lips twisted sideways, buttoning back his voice until he could trust himself to speak without shaking.

“I wish I could fix it for you, kiddo. But I can’t.”

Morgan, to her credit, nodded her head like this was the answer she expected all along.

“Then maybe I will, when I’m bigger.”

She said it the same way she did when declaring that her frog was now named Peter-Poo instead of Princess LilyBottom, or that Happy had accidentally swallowed a bug and almost cried. It was just a fact to her, not extraordinary or impossible.

Peter found himself smiling even as his eyes still burned and his heart still ached.

“Maybe you will,” he agreed.

She was a Stark, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I nabbed a Spiderverse lyric for this. I'm crossing the streams. I don't care.


End file.
